This book gives readers an accessible and comprehensive understanding of how anxiety, stress, and pressure can have a profound impact on pleasure, connection, and sexual functioning, offering practical tips and techniques for resolving common sexual struggles.

Anxiety can influence a multitude of aspects that make us who we are, changing how we move through, make meaning of, and interact with the world around us. Paula Leech begins by defining anxiety and how it affects our physiology before guiding readers to identify some of the primary sources of anxiety in their lives, such as family, gender, culture, religion, relationship dynamics, and sexual trauma. Encouraging clients to take responsibility, she offers alternative ways of conceptualizing and defining sex, sexuality, sexual values, and a client’s ongoing sexual development as a way of addressing some of the emotional, social, and psychological barriers to intimacy. Practical and engaging, this book includes mindfulness and embodiment exercises to help clients release stored tension, work through specific sexual struggles and “dysfunctions,” and deepen their connections with their body.

This guide is essential reading for established and training sex therapists as well as for those who experience anxiety-based sexual challenges with their partner.